WILTSHIRE BACON.
In the restaurants and hotels of France and Switzerland, no less than in those of London, York ham is often served, and York ham at its best is considered by epicures equal to the hams of Prague or Westphalia. But if the English hams must share honors with the products of Germany and Bohemia, when it comes to bacon, Britannia rules the world.
Let not that seem a trifling matter to any one. Bacon—I mean smoked bacon—is one of the most useful and delicious of all appetizers, alone or with other meats. It is a great tonic, too, on account of its exceptional nutritive value. Anemic individuals should eat it every morning; it is beneficial to consumptives whose digestive powers are not too enfeebled; and for nursing mothers it is an ideal food. I remember reading in a medical journal that the health of babies is often wonderfully improved if the mother eats bacon—good bacon, such as one can get in England often and in America sometimes. The drugged, denatured, indigestible rubbish usually sold in the United States as "bacon," is not fit for food. The men who make it or sell it ought to be imprisoned; some day they will be.
In view of the nutritive value of bacon and its exquisite Flavor when properly cured, it seems strange that Continental nations have not learned how to make it, except those which, like Denmark and Sweden, cater for the English market. Canada also caters to this market and Canadian bacon enjoys a much better reputation at home and abroad than that made in the United States, with a few honorable exceptions.
In England, also, bacon was not always appraised at its true value. Dryden, we are informed, "honestly liked the flitch of bacon better than more delicate fare"; but he deemed it necessary to apologize for having "a very vulgar stomach."
Doubtless, in his day, it took a robust stomach to digest bacon, and doubtless, also, it was not so delicate and so well-flavored as it is now. Wiltshire bacon is, like Southdown mutton, the outcome of years of British breeding on scientific and gastronomic principles.
Professor Robert Wallace of the University of Edinburgh tells in his "Farm Live Stock of Great Britain" what happened:
"A great change has within comparatively recent years come over the system of feeding pigs, as well as of curing their carcases. A generation ago it was the custom to kill pigs about two years old, at enormous weights, after the flesh had become coarse. The method of curing left the lean portion gorged with salt, hard, indigestible and uninviting: then it was an advantage to have a large proportion of fat to lean. Now, however, the system of mild-curing renders the flesh sweet and juicy, and all efforts are directed towards the production of as great a proportion of lean to fat as possible. The large increase of the consumption of fresh pork has also encouraged the demand for young lean bacon; and on the other hand the change of fashion which has put young and tender pork on the market has helped to increase its consumption."
Of the many English breeds the Tamworth has been found the best bacon pig. It is one of the eldest breeds and is nearly related to the wild boar. It benefited by the methods of improvement inaugurated by Bakewell and his pupil, Colling; together with some other English breeds, it has helped to modify, and in some cases has eliminated, the kinds of pigs indigenous to European countries. The Danish curers admit that without the importation of stock from England "their bacon would never have taken such high rank in the world's markets."
In the United States, unfortunately, most of the breeds are lard-hogs. "Bacon pigs," says Professor Robert Wallace, "fed on Indian corn degenerate into lard-hogs."
Now lard is doubtless a profitable article to raise, both for home use and for export. But in the kitchen the use of lard is an anachronism, since it has become generally known that butter and olive oil and beef suet are far superior to it in the yield of agreeable Flavors. Yankee ingenuity may even succeed in producing really palatable vegetable oils for cooking—a consummation devoutly to be wished, because it will help along the efforts to substitute the bacon pig for the lard hog.
When Julius Sterling Morton was United States Secretary of Agriculture he published a document which attracted much attention. It was based mainly on a communication received from an American official in England who advised American farmers, if they would secure a share of the profitable Danish and Canadian trade in cured bacon of a superior quality, to give up the various American breeds and substitute the British Tamworths or their crosses. That was many years ago, but American bacon is still for the most part what it should not be, although efforts have been made to improve it.
In the "Journal of the (British) Board of Agriculture" (1909-10, pp. 99-107) there is an interesting article on Coöperative Bacon Curing, the author of which says that the most useful breeds of pigs in the United Kingdom for bacon are Yorkshire and Berkshire breeds. But "a pure breed of pigs is not wanted by the bacon curer. What he wants is a bacon pig, and this is an animal which does not belong to any particular breed."
What is a bacon pig? The same writer answers: "A bacon pig should mature in about seven months and should weigh about 168 pounds. This yields the best and most profitable bacon. A bacon pig, furthermore, must be long in body and deep in side.... This form is desirable because it is the side of the hog that furnishes the best and most expensive cuts, and it is necessary to have as much as possible of this at the expense of the other parts."
Bacon curing as an organized industry is not much over half a century old. The Wiltshire cure of bacon is, however, referred to as far back as 1705 by Edward Lisle, in his "Observations in Husbandry." Many years later there came a great expansion of trade in Wiltshire County which made the name world-famed. To this day the bulk of British bacon is cured in Wiltshire fashion in whole sides.
There are about fifty bacon factories in the United Kingdom. While their capacity is not so great as that of the factories in the United States, the treatment and quality of American meat are, as the writer just cited remarks, "much below the standard aimed at in the United Kingdom, and notwithstanding the immense supplies of bacon which reach our country from abroad, the high price of the home product is on this account maintained."
It must not be supposed that all the bacon offered for sale in England is of superior quality. Sanders Spencer complained some years ago that the Irish bacon-curers were resting on their laurels; that a very large proportion of the pigs found in England "would be looked upon with disgust by the Danes and Canadians and that much of the meat from our home-bred pigs is inferior to a great deal of imported pork."
The temptation to use denaturing chemical preservatives and to smoke insufficiently, or not at all, in order to save weight exists in England as in America and must be combated by the consumer.
Extra choice specimens still come from some English hill farms, and the superexcellence of this bacon is due chiefly to its being skilfully smoked in the old-fashioned smoke house, which cures thoroughly while avoiding the rankness that comes from too rapid curing with very strong smoke. Properly smoked bacon is fragrant, like a flower. The other kind isn't. The test is a very simple one: if the odor makes your mouth water, it is all right.
Not only "hill-farmers" but thousands of others have a chance to get rich by catering to the gastronomic demands of the time for the best bacon, ham, and fresh young pork.
"The modern method of pig feeding has shown," as an expert informs us, "that a combination of separated milk and cereals is by far the best fattening material, and the future of the bacon-curing industry is therefore, to a large extent, in the hands of dairy farmers."
Important information on this point was gathered for the benefit of American farmers by Consul Homer M. Byington, of Bristol, and printed in the "Daily Consular and Trade Reports" for January 4, 1912. Among other things, he wrote that "Wiltshire cured hams and bacon command a higher price than the hams and bacon of any other country. It is therefore of interest to ascertain why this should be so. One of the most prominent experts in the industry has stated that it is almost entirely a question of feeding. The fine breed of hogs kept by the best farmers in Wiltshire, Somerset, and Dorset are fed principally upon skim milk and barley meal. It is claimed by the English producers that American hogs are practically all fed on corn, which, although a perfectly wholesome food, tends to make the hog fat, and a little mellow, whereas feeding by the British method gives a meat beautifully white and as solid as meat need be." Referring to a leading Wiltshire curer, the Consul continues:
"This latter firm, although purchasing 2,000 to 3,000 hogs per week from farmers in the surrounding territory, does not allow any breeder under contract to give his animals refuse for food. The pigs are subject to an ante-mortem and a post-mortem examination by a qualified veterinary surgeon and medical officer of health. No boracic acid or other injurious preservative is used in curing."
In Germany, where one gets not only hams of the best quality, but excellent roast pork, many others besides farmers have taken to raising pigs. In 1873 there were only 7,124,088 pigs in the country; in 1907 there were over 22,000,000. The number of sheep has decreased in about the same proportion because three hogs can be raised by a peasant where he could not graze one sheep.
Pigs are particularly profitable because they can be fed largely on kitchen refuse and unsalable skim milk and because a pig "will produce a pound of meat from a far less weight of food than will either sheep or cattle."
By "mixing brains with the food," the profits can be enormously increased. Let me ask every American and English farmer to put the following words of England's leading authority, Sanders Spencer, into his pipe and smoke them slowly and thoroughly:
"This selection of a compact, thick-fleshed, and pure quality sire is of even greater importance in the pig department of the farm than in many others, as our object is to breed a pig which is capable of converting a large quantity of food into the largest amount of fine quality of meat, and is so formed that the latter is placed on those portions of the pig's body which realize the largest price in the market."[17]
There is a funny story of a farmer who gave his pigs all they could eat one day and starved them the next, in order to have his bacon nicely streaked with alternate layers of fat and lean. In England they seem to have a number of these ingenious farmers; at any rate, in Wiltshire bacon there is always plenty of lean meat. And how delicious it tastes when grilled, or baked in a roasting pan on a wire rack from which the fat drips to the bottom of the pan!
When the bacon is too fat to suit the native connoisseur it is apparently exported to America and sold at fancy prices to people who have more money than knowledge.
Gastronomic demands suggest many opportunities to get rich, particularly along this line. Spencer speaks of the "marvelous increase in the proportion of the inhabitants of the British Isles who now eat pork." Ireland exported nearly $17,500,000 worth of pork products in 1909. The slaughter houses of Denmark deal with over a million pigs a year, largely for export to the United Kingdom, which, in 1911, imported altogether nearly $100,000,000 worth of bacon and other pork products.
In epicurean France pork gains rapidly on other meats and the Germans eat nearly twice as much pork as they do beef. The figures, in pounds, of the per capita consumption in the Empire for the first three months of 1912 stood in this ratio: Mutton 0.33; veal, 1.54; beef, 7.87; pork, 14.55.